Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Intuit, Telemetry, Meetup
I'd prefer an apology from the IRS. Rico writes "Intuit have spoken out about the CD-protection methods of their TurboTax software. According to them, the protection is harmless to computers and does not erase data. Despite the huge negative customer feedback, Intuit are still profiting from the product."
Train the dog, then never call the command. Mitch Wagner writes "Barry Shein, subject of this week's /. interview, proposes in "ISP Head Floats Plan To Legalize Spam" that spam is impossible to block, and so instead should be legitimized and regulated, with a central, not-for-profit company charged with collecting fees from spammers and distributing those fees to ISPs that receive the spam. Of course, there have been many other plans for charging spammers to send spam, but those plans mostly have the fees going to the ISP that sends the e-mail, or to the user that receives the mail, rather than the ISP that receives it and has to deliver it to the end-users. I'm the author of the piece I link to in this article."
Make big money as an open source telemetrist! For anyone who missed it in the Science section, there's a great followup to the Linux-based home-brewed weather balloon we recently featured: the OpenTRAC project is looking for help in building an APRS-like protocol. If that's gibberish to you, check out their introduction to the protocol to get an idea of how it's useful. Future experimenters will thank you.
One good deed escapes punishment. Psyiode writes with a link to this story at the Houston Chronicle which begins "Jurors needed only about 15 minutes to acquit a Houston man who was accused of hacking into the Harris County district clerk's wireless computer system in March. One juror, Helen Smith, 62, said she and the other jurors found that Stefan Puffer indeed hacked into the system but they did not believe he caused any damage as the government had alleged."
Puffer was arrested last summer for demonstrating that the county court's wireless LAN wasn't secure, and telling them about it.
Do we need manned spaceflight? Professor_Quail writes "The BBC has a story on NASA's plans for a successor to the Space Shuttle. From the article: Nasa has revealed its first set of mission criteria for the Orbital Space Plane (OSP) - the series of space vehicle expected to replace the space shuttle from 2012. The new spacecraft's primary function will be to ferry crews to and from the International Space Station (ISS) and serve as a lifeboat if the station has to be evacuated."
Or do you have other plans? Finally, rufo writes "For those of you brave enough to weather the elements and meet your fellow geek, don't forget that the Slashdot Meetup is this Thursday at 7PM your local time zone. I've been to a couple and there's some rather interesting characters that show up, and the conversations are quite engaging. Highly recommended if you have nothing better to do on a Thursday evening." Hmmm, must check to see if there's one around Knoxville ...
I emailed their PR contact, and posted their reply to both the original slashdot story and my journal.
After reading previous Slashdot posts regarding TurboTax activation and CDilla issues plus reviews from Walter Mossberg and others, I bought TaxCut this year.
I was able to install on 2 machines and print forms from either one. I'm gonna file later this week, and I won't be doing it from the machine I did the original install on. Couldn't have done that with TurboTax. Only TaxCut gotcha is that the rental property assistant isn't that good at reading data from last year's TurboTax return.
Seems pretty nice. The best part is, you don't have to pay a dime until you get to the printing/filing part, so you can try it out and see if it suits you. No DRM/platform hassles that I can see; it works in Safari, Chimera and Internet Explorer on my Mac OS X box. The basic version is only $20 (+ $15 for your state forms), which seems to be worth the hassle of puzziling over the IRS's forms and all the different classifications you could possibly fall under (I'm in a slightly odd situation though, so the 1040EZ may wind up being a cheaper choice if there's nothing funky you have to do...) Here's the link if people are interested: http://www.turbotax.intuit.com/welcome/perm/banner 11/welcome.htm.
My English teacher once told me that two positives don't make a negative. Two words for her: Yeah, right.
Have you looked at Appgen? I am currently evaluating them as a Quickbooks/Quicken replacement, and even as a MySYS/AccPAC replacement. Multiplatform, modular, reads Quicken files natively, seems to know what a Canadian is... So far so good.
This sort of thing is exactly the reason the best advice is to never speak with a member of law enforcement without an attorney present if you even think you are or will be accused of a crime.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Everyone I know who has bought Turbotax has done so before they knew about the full pain in the ass that this copy protection is. To these people, I have evangelized TaxCut, which I have used for my taxes this year. Most people's hangup is that they think that TaxCut can't bring in their previous year information from a TurboTax file, but it can.
As far as the protection itself is concerned, I know I am preaching to the choir when I say that writing any kind of information to the MBR other than the day you format a disk or install a bootloader is a big no-no. Inuit is deluding themselves if they think this won't affect them in the long run.
-R
"Puffer was arrested last summer for demonstrating that the county court's wireless LAN wasn't secure, and telling them about it."
This is backwards. In March of last year Puffer told the county their wireless LAN was insecure. He then arranged a demonstration. Three or four months later he was indicted - not arrested - for wire fraud.
Don't worry. I'm busy at a photo shoot on that evening.
I'll be your brown eyed girl.
http://www.pctest.com/intuit/test.htm
The top of this page says:
Turbo Tax Uninstalls Fully....Pass
Then below it says:
TurboTax was not uninstalled completely, some files and registry entries...
Intuit will let you use Turbotax for the web for Free as in beer and efile for free if you have a AGI of $27,000 or less, or can claim the earned income tax credit. That is state and fed forms and efileing.
Oh puhlease. Little known but true fact about CMU: it's the nation's leading drama school, and has a damn good fine arts program as well. We're not all geeks here.
You do know that you can get every form as a PDF at the IRS website don't you?
My system uses LILO to boot Windows 98 or Suse Linux on the secondary disk. I installed and used Turbotax, and have not had any problems with booting either operating system.
However, I have had problems with Turbotax crashing the system when it attempts to go on-line for activation and updates. I had to use the "telephone activation" process.
This year's version of Turbotax seems to me to be harder to use, and has less tax help, than it has been in previous years. There used to be a lot of tax help included with the program. The new version sends you to an on-line "Tax Adviser" for questions -- at extra cost.
Next year I'll be using something else.